La historia del cohete Saturno V

Video from the channel male park about Saturn V, linked on its Above Ten Thousand entry. Duration: 1:14:15. Language: Spanish. Video type: Documentary.

The documentary, dubbed into Spanish, tells how NASA conceived, built and tested the Saturn V, the rocket the Apollo programme used to carry astronauts to the Moon. It runs from Kennedy's lunar commitment to the launcher's last flight, interspersing testimony from engineers and science communicators with period footage.

The story starts with the German V-2 rocket and Wernher von Braun, who arrived in the United States in September 1945 with his team, documentation and captured rockets. Soviet successes such as Sputnik 1 in October 1957, Sputnik 2 with the dog Laika, and Yuri Gagarin's flight contrast with the Vanguard failure in December 1957. The American response came with the country's first satellite in January 1958 and with Alan Shepard's flight in May 1961, leading to the speech in which Kennedy set the goal of reaching the Moon by the end of the decade. The documentary also covers the abandonment of the Nova project, the Gemini programme, Kennedy's assassination and the January 1967 fire that killed Grissom, White and Chaffee.

The launcher had three stages and stood 110 metres tall. Boeing, North American Aviation, Douglas Aircraft and IBM took part in building it, with IBM responsible for the instrument unit. The first stage, 42 metres long, used kerosene and liquid oxygen in five F-1 engines. Combustion instabilities in those engines were solved with baffles. The second stage used a common bulkhead between hydrogen at −252 °C and oxygen at −182 °C to save weight. The third stage used a restartable J-2 engine, and the explosion of a pressurisation sphere during a test forced a review of the welds. Apollo 4 debuted the Saturn V in November 1967. Apollo 6, in April 1968, suffered the pogo effect, which caused two second-stage J-2 engines to shut down. Then came Apollo 8, the rocket's first crewed flight, Apollo 9, Apollo 10 and Apollo 11, launched on 16 July 1969. Between 1968 and 1972, 24 men travelled to the Moon and 12 walked on its surface. The last Saturn V launched the first American space station in 1973.